Margaret Mccarthy PhD

Margaret McCarthy received a PhD from the Institute of Animal Behavior at Rutgers University, Newark NJ, postdoctoral training at Rockefeller University, and was a National Research Council Fellow at NIAAA before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1993. She was a Professor in the Department of Physiology before becoming the Chair of the Department of Pharmacology in 2011.

McCarthy has a long-standing interest in the cellular mechanisms establishing sex differences in the brain. She uses a combined behavioral and mechanistic approach in the laboratory rat to understand both normal brain development and how these processes might go selectively awry in males versus females. She is the former President of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences and currently serves as Chair for the Board of Scientific Councilors of NIMH, an Associate Editor at Hormones and Behavior, and on the Advisory Board of eNeuro. Dr. McCarthy is a Member of the Dana Alliance on Brain Research and a Fellow of AAAS. She was awarded the University of Maryland Researcher of the Year and Champion of Excellence awards in 2015 and 2017, respectively.

She has published over 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts and her work has been cited close to 10,000 times. In 2019, McCarthy was recognized for all of her accomplishments over her 25-year career with the distinguished James and Carolyn Frenkil Dean's Professorship.